On the Verisimilitude of Tendency Hypotheses

Abstract

Tendency hypotheses – T-hypotheses, for short –, such as “the individuals of the kind Y tend to be X”, are used within several empirical sciences and play an important role in some of them, for instance in social sciences. However, so far T-hypotheses have received little or no attention by philosophers of science and statisticians.¹ An exception is the work made in the seventies of the past century by the statisticians and social scientists David K. Hildebrand, James D. Laing, and Howard Rosenthal who worked out – under the label of prediction logic –, an interesting approach to the analysis of T-hypotheses.²